Online Shipping Upgrades are a Ripoff
If you're anything like me, you do a lot of online shopping. You might also be as impatient as I am. So, have you ever been tempted to pay for upgraded shipping at a site (such as Amazon.com) when their free shipping will do? I'm not talking about upgrading to overnight shipping, or anything like that. I'm talking about simply going from the free "Super Saver" shipping (or whatever the site in question happens to call it) to the standard shipping that's billed as being one notch better.
Merchants often go out of their way to scare you into the shipping upgrade, often quoting delivery times of 7-14 days when you select the Free Shipping option, whereas the standard option promises 3-5 days, or something similar. As it turns out, however, both options often go via the same carrier, and at the same level of service (e.g., UPS Ground) meaning that the only way 'Free' could be slower would be if the vendor chose to sit on your order for a few extra days. In my experience, they never do. And why would they? It's just taking up space in their warehouse. So... While there are sometimes good reasons to pay extra for faster shipping (like when you need an item overnight), do yourself a favor... The next time you feel the urge to bump your shipping from free to standard, expedited, or whatever they happen to call it, just sit tight. You'll most likely get your stuff just as fast as if you had gone with the free option, and you'll save yourself a few bucks while you're at it.
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This isn't entirely true from my experience. Amazon is said to ship cheaply by waiting until it can ship a big bundle of orders (i.e. shipping in bulk) to a point close to the point of delivery, and then shipping them from there. I've noticed that when I ordered a few books from Amazon, the books where shrinkwrapped together and also to a cardboard sheet, presumably to prevent the books from getting bent edges. Then that thing was in a box that I received from DHL. It saves Amazon money, and it definitely is slower choosing the free shipping option from them. It might not go for all retailers, though. If you plan ahead so you have plenty of time to spare, you never need to actually pay for shipping :)
John, I agree that what Amazon seems to be doing is sending a whole truck of stuff at freight shipping rates to a location where the orders are then broken apart and shipped to their relatively close destinations.
However, I don't believe that the books shrink-wrapped to a piece of cardboard is evidence of this. I've ordered about $8k in book from Amazon between 1999 and today, and I recall receiving books shrink-wrapped to a piece of cardboard long before the free shipping offer existed (which was in January 2002, according to http://auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y02/m06/i19/s03).
Putting on my CEO cap, I can guess that the way to do free shipping is to actually box and label all shipments that are being sent on the truck at the warehouse where they are packaged, not where they are received from the truck. My reason for this would be that most likely the truck goes straight to a carrier's distribution hub, not to a warehouse manned by Amazon employees; so everything had better be packaged and labeled so that it can just be put on a local delivery truck without further trouble. I don't think that Amazon is shipping individual orders shrink-wrapped to pieces of cardboard, without boxes and labels, to a distribution point, as I think you may have suspected.
Sorry for the long post... I've been thinking about this topic a lot and had to vent :)
Harold
